A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [87]
Annabelle began to feel that not only had the circumstances of the present changed utterly and irrevocably but that the facts of her own past were slipping away. When solidity and certainty began to slide away from her father, she herself was left feeling altered and disoriented. For the first time she realized that a very different Timber Island had existed before the Woodman empire had cluttered up its acreage and set sail from its shores. But, more disturbing, she could feel the indifferent future—a future that would have nothing to do with her or her family—stirring like a subtle tremor just below the surfaces of everything that until now had represented permanence.
One by one, the outbuildings on the island began to fall into disrepair. Cummings had retired: there was little work for him to do in any case. The white paint on the clapboard was all but gone by the time he locked the door of the office for the last time and made his final journey toward the waterlogged pier, a journey that Annabelle watched, in some ways without regret, from her kitchen window. The empty smithy was next to show signs of succumbing to January’s howling winds and an unusually heavy weight of snow, and at this point Annabelle saw that her father’s arthritis had worsened, making it difficult for him to stand erect. When the huge, splendid building where the ships had been born was blown down by a March gale, and the beams of its vaulted ceiling lay scattered like the bones of a huge extinct animal, Annabelle knew that her father’s collapse would likely follow suit. And she was right. He took to his bed that May and after a few weeks of fever and delirium, he began to repeat the phrase devil’s steamships over and over again. Then, one early morning, he clutched Annabelle’s arm, told her that Gilderson would certainly attempt to steal the lake. Before she could ask him what he meant by this warning, he died. At the funeral only Maurice, her father’s beloved Badger, wept openly, though his sorrow was to abate somewhat when he discovered that he was to inherit the lion’s share of his grandfather’s still sizable though admittedly diminished fortune. The remaining sum would go to Branwell and Marie and would be used for improvements to their hotel. Annabelle would become sole heir to the empty, changed world of the island: the deteriorating architecture, the dwindling resources, the broken ships lying under the waters of Back Bay.
Three or four weeks after her father’s death, on an afternoon in early June, Annabelle decided to take on the task of organizing and cleaning the sagging, and now structurally unsound, office. In contrast to the sparse furnishings and generally stark appearance of this interior, the lacquered wooden shelves that lined the four walls of the large inner office were overflowing with a profusion of loose papers, ledger books, cardboard and wooden boxes, rolled maps tied with frayed cords, charts, and an assortment of small dusty wax models for what might or might not have become ships’ figureheads. There were several stacks of scribblers; each one, according to the labels carefully pasted on the cover, was an account of the journey of a raft down the river to Quebec. The first hundred or so of these logs were written in the hand of Annabelle’s father, the rest in the hand of her brother.
This is all that remains, thought Annabelle, of the efforts of her father and those like him. She had no idea what to keep and what to throw away and though she had brought several burlap